Today, Explained - Will Kevin McCarthy become speaker?

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

The 118th Congress has begun with a showdown over who will be elected House speaker. Vox’s Andrew Prokop argues that this is the culmination of a decade-long trend of stonewalling in Congress. Today’s show was produced by Amanda Lewellyn and Victoria Chamberlin. It was edited by Amina Al-Sadi and was fact-checked by Serena Solin. It was engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey and hosted by Noel King Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our nation's representatives gathered today to try it again, to elect a Speaker of the House. They nominated Hakeem Jeffries. They nominated Kevin McCarthy. It's about our nation's future. The person who will lead us on that journey will be Kevin McCarthy. He has earned this position. They nominated Kevin Hearn. They nominated Jim Jordan. Earlier today, Kevin McCarthy was on a conference call trying to appease the Republicans who are refusing to back his bid for speaker. The compromises that he has made would diminish his power as speaker. But after 13 failed votes, McCarthy seems to have decided it's worth it. We need to talk about Kevin.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Joining us in our 74-ish of the trials of Kevin McCarthy is Andrew Prokop.

He's a senior politics correspondent at Vox. Andrew, describe what we are seeing on this day. It's pretty much disarray is the real word to describe it. The House is stuck in an endless groundhog day-like loop of repeatedly voting on the speaker and repeatedly failing to come up with a majority choice for the speaker. They can't do anything as a result of it. They can't set up their committees. They can't move ahead with legislation. They can't do much to help out their constituents.

Don Bacon and I were supposed to be meeting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Skiff here to talk about matters in the Indo-Pacific. But I'm informed by House security that technically I don't have a clearance. Everything is just kind of messy and stuck and no one is really sure how it's going to end up. Why do they keep voting if Kevin McCarthy doesn't have the votes and no one else seems to either? So because of House rules, they are kind of by default tasked with voting on a speaker until they come up with a speaker because there is no speaker to tell them not to do that. So the only thing they can do if they come up with a majority to vote to do something else, like change the rules of the speaker election or briefly adjourn until tomorrow, which they've done a couple times, they can do that if a majority of the House votes to do that.

But even that has proved difficult. It's been hard for Kevin McCarthy to line up a majority of votes to even get them to take a break from voting. The question is on the motion that the House stands adjourned until noon tomorrow. Those in favor say aye, those opposed no. No! No! No!

No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!

No! No! No! No! No! In the opinion of the chair, the no's have it. Give me a sense, Andrew, of the numbers. There were 222 Republicans elected in last year's midterm elections. And to have a majority of votes in the House, you need 218. So he could afford to lose four, but if he lost five, he'd fall short of the majority. The way the Speaker's election works, you really need an actual majority of the people present and voting in that speaker election. So Democrats vote for, in this case, Hakeem Jeffries, their new leader now that Nancy Pelosi has stepped down. Hakeem Jeffries. Jeffries.

And Republicans, most of them, voted for McCarthy, but a breakaway faction did not vote for McCarthy. They voted for a rotating cast of characters who they allegedly would prefer to be Speaker over McCarthy. They started out with... My friend and colleague from Arizona, Andy Biggs. Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona. He's part of the hard right Freedom Caucus.

Then they threw their votes behind Jim Jordan. I'm nominating Jim Jordan from Ohio for Speaker of the House of Representatives. The likely chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which was interesting because Jordan is supporting Kevin McCarthy and even gave the speech nominating him on the second ballot. And I think Kevin McCarthy is the right guy to lead us. I really do or I wouldn't be standing up here giving this speech. Then they switched to Byron Donald. Byron Donald's a relatively new representative from Florida who some Republicans think is a rising star. And Representative Matt Gaetz even threw a vote to former President Donald Trump. The Honorable Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received one. Who's been holding out?

It's a motley crew with a variety of motivations. I think of them as falling into three main groups. The first is the ideological hardliners. They're motivated by policy. This is about the future of the country. This is about the direction of the country. American people who are looking at this body and wondering why we can pass $1.7 trillion bills that are unpaid for. They really are against government spending. They want to make big changes to the way the government passes its appropriation bills. They want to drastically cut perhaps government benefits.

And so for them, this is about policy and it's about winning concessions that they think will help them win policy fights later in this Congress. The second group I think of as kind of the fringe. It is not happening. And as it's been said, we need to get to a point where we start evaluating what life after Kevin McCarthy looks like.

Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Paul Gosar of Arizona. These are people who have embraced some pretty far out stuff, QAnon theories about child trafficking or election related conspiracy theories. They just seem to have a really anti-establishment orientation and distrust in the establishment. That seems to be driving them more than specific policy grievances. Finally, the third group, for them, it's more personal. These are perhaps people who have reasons to just distrust Kevin McCarthy as a person or to dislike him and want to see him defeated. Some of them just maybe want to make a little mischief. I think that describes pretty well Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida,

who has been one of the ringleaders of this effort. Everything I heard hardened my resolve that this town desperately needs change. And if it's a few of us who have been one of the ringleaders of this effort. Everything I heard hardened my resolve that this town desperately needs change. And if it's a few of us who have to stand in the breach to force it, we are willing to do so for as long as it takes. What do they want from McCarthy, the ones who aren't just trying to cause trouble? So there are a few main things that have been under discussion. One involves what's known as the motion to vacate the chair it's uh it's a bit of a mouthful but basically it forces a no confidence vote of sorts on mccarthy this is a kind of a tool

that the hardline conservatives want to use to hang over mccarthy's head if he does something they don't like they can use this motion to vacate the chair. They can put it forward and perhaps force another speaker vote and bring us back here to Groundhog Day if McCarthy lacks a majority to stay in office. Through most of the House's history, it was very easy. It just took one member to advance this motion to vacate the chair, and then the House would have to vote on it. But almost no one ever did it.

But when Nancy Pelosi took over in 2019, she changed the rules to make that more difficult, which she thought would make her better able to lead the chamber as she saw fit. McCarthy reportedly on Wednesday night acquiesced to this. He said, OK, my offer includes rolling back the rule to the way it used to be. He gave them what they want. Why aren't they voting for him? Well, there's a lot more that they want, too. Some of the gripes from the really anti-spending faction have been about the basic ways that Congress handles its big spending bills. They just passed a huge omnibus appropriations bill funding the government last month.

And conservatives had a lot of complaints about this process and about the bill itself. that, you know, instead of one big omnibus bill, we want 12 separate appropriations bills and that everybody has to be able to put forward amendments to it. Again, McCarthy seems to have moved at least somewhat in their direction on that topic. They also want certain committee seats and subcommittee chairmanships. One interesting one is about the House Rules Committee. They control what bills go on the House floor, how those bills are discussed and debated, how much time they will be debated for, and what amendments will be on offer. Traditionally, the Speaker has pretty tight control over what this committee does, but these hardliners want some seats on that committee so they will be able to, you know, maybe not go along with what Kevin McCarthy might want on some of these bills.

And so it sounds to me like the holdouts are saying, Representative McCarthy, Kev, we want X, Y and Z, but we don't yet know if they're really going to move. Yes, there have been a lot of demands made, and McCarthy has given in on some of those demands. But as they like to say on Capitol Hill, nothing's agreed to until everything is agreed to. They're still talking. Some of them have sounded encouraging about these talks, while others of the holdouts who have been perhaps less involved in the talks have continued to reiterate that they will never support McCarthy. And the key question is how many are in each camp. He really doesn't have much room to spare. He's got to win over almost all of these people. So even if there are only five truly dug in, really anti-McCarthy votes, then he can't get there.

Amid all of this, there is another party in the room, the Democratic Party. What are the Democrats doing? So the Democrats on every single round of balloting so far have remained united in support of their own speaker candidate, Hakeem Jeffries. They are not offering up their votes to bail Kevin McCarthy out of this jam, and he is not asking for their votes. He actually promised that he would not seek any Democratic votes to help get him elected speaker. Andrew, is there another candidate who could replace McCarthy, i.e., maybe not a Biggs or a Jordan who have got a handful of votes, but somebody who really could get, you know, 200 plus odd votes? That's a bit of a mystery right now. How much of this opposition is really just a personal thing about Kevin McCarthy and how much of it is an opposition to mainstream Republican leadership in general?

A little over seven years ago, there was a similar situation unfolding in the House. The Speaker John Boehner had resigned and a guy named Kevin McCarthy put in his name to be his replacement. But McCarthy couldn't line up the votes on the right, so he withdrew from contention before actually any votes took place on the House floor. There was a lot of consternation among Republicans. Who could unify us? And then Paul Ryan stepped forward. He became the unity candidate that got the mainstream Republicans and the hardline conservatives on board. I never thought I'd be speaker. But early in my life, I wanted to serve this house. I thought this place was exhilarating. There are some theories that if the hardliners did succeed in tanking McCarthy,

they might just vote for his number two, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, that if Scalise ran, maybe, you know, maybe they would feel that they made their point and they would be happy to give Scalise a shot. is really thinking about right now, somebody in the Republican conference somewhere who is liked by all sides, who could have the trust of both sides and somehow bring the group together. But we do appear to be pretty far from that happening right now. Both sides are pretty dug in, the pro-McCarthy faction and the anti-McCarthy faction. Do you want to know how we got here? More with Andrew Prokop coming up. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

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Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Kevin! Today Explained, we're back with Vox senior politics correspondent Andrew Prokop, who says this week's mess in Congress is at least a decade in the making. I would trace these current dynamics really back to the Tea Party. We can't spend more than we take in. You can't do it as an individual.

You can't do it as a family. You can't do it at your place of work.'t do it as a family. You can't do it at your place of work. And we can't let the government do it anymore. After the George W. Bush administration and the early Obama administration, the issue that was really motivating a lot of the new breed of Republican politicians and a faction of the incumbent Republicans who disliked the previous leadership was government spending. They wanted to cut government spending badly. And so in the Tea Party wave of 2010, a lot of these members were elected to Congress and Republicans took the House.

And what happened was that these anti-spending Republicans really wanted to use very aggressive negotiating tactics to try to force the Democrats to accept major conservative policy changes. There were a couple of bills over the ensuing few years that were viewed as must-pass bills in Washington. The first was raising the debt ceiling. The overwhelming numbers of Democratic leaders and Republican leaders both know that not extending the debt limit is not a responsible option. Before 2011, there was a lot of political posturing around the debt ceiling.

But that year is when the new Tea Party Republicans really decided to take things to the brink. Shame on this country for making this a political exercise yesterday. Shame on a Senate who said we will not take up the bill. How are we going to deal with the bigger problem of the national debt when we get to next year's budget if we can't cut a few pennies now. They really argued that they would not raise the debt ceiling unless Obama drastically cut spending. In the end, they were somewhat successful because Obama wanted to come

to the table there. He did want to be seen as a spending cutter for his re-election. So a deal was eventually made. They didn't get everything they wanted, far from it, but they did force some concessions. Now, is this the deal I would have preferred? No. So they tried this again in 2013 about another must-pass bill funding the government. Basically, Congress has to pass appropriations bills every year, keeping the government funded, or else there will be a government shutdown. Republicans didn't say they wanted to shut down the government. What they said in 2013 was, we will only fund the government if Obamacare,

the newly passed Affordable Care Act, was defunded. The House has made its position known very clearly. if Obamacare, the newly passed Affordable Care Act, was defunded. The House has made its position known very clearly. We believe that we should fund the government, and we think there ought to be basic fairness for all Americans under Obamacare. And there was a government shutdown. It lasted two weeks. Republican poll numbers plummeted. They looked terrible, and they eventually caved.

It's kind of this desire on the right to drive a really hard bargain, to ask for things that Democrats mostly obviously would not agree to, but to refuse to fund the basic mechanics of governments as bargaining chips to try to get their way. Are the fights such as they exist the same today or were different battle lines drawn in the post Donald Trump world or during Donald Trump's presidency? So the rise of Trump kind of scrambled Republican policy priorities a bit. The spending issue, which had been so consuming during the Obama years, dropped in relative importance. Other issues like immigration, the culture war, or even just Trump's personal scandals and the

desire to defend him from them rose in interest and importance on the right. But it's not as if, you know, there's zero interest in the Republican Party in cutting spending now. There are still some people who care about these issues and some activist groups and well-funded organizations that are still trying to push this agenda. And because McCarthy's and the Republican House majority this year is so small, even if you have just a handful of members who still really care about this, they can make it a big deal when it comes to something like the speaker vote where he really needs their support. Let's say the holdouts do come around.

Let's say Kevin McCarthy is elected speaker. What has the debacle this week illustrated to us about how a McCarthy Congress would operate. It seems to me like Republican speakers of the House are kind of stuck in an endless cycle of recurrence where they face the same tensions that eventually consume them that they can't deal with. The issue is that these must-pass bills,

government funding, and the debt ceiling, they really do have to pass. And the Republican leaders know they have to pass. They believe that their own party will pay a very serious political price if they're blamed for breaching the debt ceiling or if the government is shut down with no end in sight. They just got to deal with it. But there is a faction of the House Republicans who refuse to accept this logic and this way of thinking. And so what happened under Speaker Boehner and Speaker Ryan was that they needed to get Democratic votes to

pass these things, the debt ceiling increase and government funding bills. And that became the basic status quo of how the government kept operating. Even when there was a Republican majority, dozens of Republicans would vote against these spending bills and Ryan or Boehner would rely on Democrats to actually get them, the angrier the right gets, the dissatisfaction rises. And then you get something like an effort to depose Boehner, as was launched by then-Representative Mark Meadows in 2015, which helped lead to Boehner's resignation. That's how you get Paul Ryan kind of getting fed up with politics and deciding to retire in 2018. And that's how you get these tensions right now that are already consuming McCarthy when he hasn't even really done anything yet. The conservatives, they understand this cycle and they understand that McCarthy is going to probably cut deals with Democrats eventually because he has to. But cutting those deals

will undercut his support on the right and may lead to his ouster. Is there a way out of this? There are two scenarios in which kind of the loop could be broken. One is if the mainstream Republicans just get so fed up with these malcontents on the far right that they're willing to work with Democrats and they see no problem in kind of isolating the far right, making them irrelevant and creating a kind of durable governing majority that would both pass the bills keeping government running and would also save

McCarthy if there's an effort to depose him. The other way out, I think, would be kind of if the members of Congress on the far right themselves just decide to chill out a little bit. And that might sound a little fanciful, but occasionally they do decide to do that. Sometimes this is more about posturing and making an impact and not necessarily about diehard lockstep commitment to a specific course of action. And if this doesn't stop, it doesn't get resolved, what happens? It's going to be a tumultuous couple of years under this dysfunctional Republican House majority and Democratic Senate and presidency. Like, how are they going to come to agreement? It's very difficult to see. But it is possible in the end, it may be inevitable if enough Republicans really

do accept that it's unthinkable to breach the debt ceiling, or to keep a government shutdown indefinite. But, you know, probably some government shutdown, I would anticipate is pretty likely in the next year or two. The problem is getting to the point where the compromise happens in a way that does not lose McCarthy all of his support on the right and get him pushed out. Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and Victoria Chamberlain. It was edited by Amina El-Sadi and fact-checked by Serena Solon and engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. complaint.